Devils in Dark Houses

by B. E. Scully

  The Hound’s face flushed with pride even as his stomach knotted into a giant ball of anxiety. Could he do it? Would he lose his nerve? He’d rather die himself than let the Bone Man down.

  As if reading his mind, Bone Man gave him what the Hound thought was supposed to be a reassuring smile, though in truth it was anything but on that ghastly cranium. “If anything goes wrong—anything at all—you know what to do, right?”

  “If they shoot first, come out blazing.”

  Bone Man had told the Hound when to be in the alleyway behind the blue dumpster, but the Hound had trouble with time. In order to make sure he didn’t mess up, he’d gone to the alleyway first thing in the morning to wait. The late winter sky was almost dark by the time the two men showed up, and by then the Hound’s legs were cramped so bad he worried he wouldn’t be able to stand up fast enough if something went wrong. He’d already peed three times and the water bottle and sandwich he’d brought along had vanished hours ago.

  But now the men were here.

  “If they shoot first, come out blazing,” he whispered to the blue.

  He recognized Ivy right away. The other man was big and solid as a bear, lumbering toward the end of the alleyway with both arms swinging. He had a thick shock of silver white hair and glasses with thick black lenses, like the men wore on T.V. shows from the 1950s.

  They came to the end of the alleyway, so close that the Hound could smell the liquor coming from Bear’s pores, could smell the rank smoke and body odor on Ivy’s clothes.

  Bear spoke first. “Okay, Wroe, this better be good. It’s damp, my arthritis is cursing a blue streak, and you’ve been stringing me along now for almost three weeks. Time’s up. Either give me some kind of goods on Falten or you’re going down right along with your cousin for the Shickler murder. I’ve got enough evidence to put you away for life. Or I could make sure that evidence disappears. Up to you, but time’s up either way.”

  “Time’s up all right,” Ivy said, pulling a pistol from his coat pocket and aiming it at Bear’s chest.

  All of a sudden, the Hound heard Manlike Woman’s voice come down the alleyway with the wind. The same kind of gun Bone Man gave you…

  But then the wind was gone.

  The Hound thought Bear would try to run away, but he just stood there laughing his deep-throated, growly bear laugh. “Put that damn thing away, you idiot.”

  But Ivy didn’t put it away. “You’ve either lost your touch completely or the drink’s finally rotted the last of your brains, Klein. Coming into a part of town like this, all the way down this dark alley all by yourself. Could get a dirty cop killed real quick.”

  “Stop wasting my damn time, Wroe. I was on these streets before you even sneaked through your father’s broken condom. You’re a slimeball, but you’re no killer.”

  “Then why do you want to put me away as one?”

  “I don’t, which you’d know if you could stop being a jackass for even one full minute and listen to what I’m saying. You’ve been doing Falten’s dirty work for years. I know it, you know it, everyone knows it. Only I’m the guy who’s finally going to do something about it. I’ll be damned if I’m going to see that son-of-a-bitch make chief of police. You don’t even need to give me anything big. Just enough to put a stain on him for good. But for that I need proof, and not just the word of some street clown like you. I need solid, reporter ready proof. So put up or be shut up—thirty years to life. Hey,” Bear said, laughing, “that was a pretty good one.”

  Ivy apparently didn’t think so. “You just don’t get it, do you, Klein? Falten may be a son-of-a-bitch, but he was right about one thing—you should have hung it up long ago. See, Falten’s a powerful man. He’s going places. You’re a nobody, a pariah in your own department. You’re going nowhere. Except down.”

  Then all of a sudden the alleyway filled with thunder. The Hound was so frightened he peed his pants right where he sat. The thunder boomed once, twice, then one last time. The Hound saw the Bear look down at his chest and then up at Ivy.

  “I’ll be a son-of-a…” he said, and then the big Bear crumpled to the ground.

  The Hound sat frozen, terrified. Then the Bone Man’s voice rang in his ear, even louder than the thunder.

  “If they shoot first, come out blazing!” the Hound shouted along with Bone Man, staggering to his feet. Ivy was still holding the gun, and when he swung around to face the Hound, it was pointed straight at his chest.

  Straight at his chest.

  The Hound aimed and fired, once, twice, then two more times, to be sure. Ivy crumpled to the ground less than five feet in front of the fallen bear. The alleyway was silent, but the Hound’s ears were ringing so bad, his hands and legs shaking so bad, that he might as well have been at the bottom of the ocean, or floating in outer space.

  In the distance, he heard a police siren wail to life.

  He’d killed a man. But he didn’t feel like somebody. He felt like the worse thing in the world, even worse than a scoundrel and cheat like Edouard Chambreau or even his ivy-covered descendant. He felt like a killer, like something non-human. Like an alien.

  Run, the voice came back on the wind. RUN! Manlike Woman said.

  And so the Hound ran. He ran out of the alleyway and down the dark street as fast and far as he could go. Somewhere, Manlike Woman said, “Hide the gun!” and the Hound realized he was still carrying it, flashing it around for the whole world to see. He shoved the gun inside his coat and kept running.

  When he finally stopped, he was deep in the cool, damp forest. Manlike Woman was there, and she was crying.

  “You have to hide, Hound,” she told him. “He tricked you—the Bone Man tricked you. And now he’ll come for you. He’ll arrest you and put you in prison for a long time, or maybe even kill you, like he did Bear and Ivy.”

  But the Hound knew he had killed Ivy. Even though the Bone Man had tricked him into it, and even though Ivy had killed a man first, the Hound was officially a killer.

  He had done what Manlike Woman had told him and stayed deep in the mountains. He’d brought enough food to last him a week, maybe two if he was careful, and he made a shelter for himself at the bottom of an old logging trail and waited, watching for Ivy behind every towering pine and rush of river. But Ivy had never turned up. He must not have had any stories to finish.

  The Hound had been safe in the mountains, but he knew the Bone Man would find him one way or the other…

  Something wet and hard pressed against Dream-Hound’s hand. He opened his one blue eye and found himself staring into two amber eyes belonging to a small, scrawny black-and-white cat. He reached out his hand and scratched the cat’s head, under the chin and at the back of the neck, the way cats liked, and the scruffy scrap of fur began to purr.

  The Hound smiled for the first time in a long time. He rummaged in his pockets and found some leftover sandwich meat. He tore it into small pieces and made a pile for Scruff. The little cat scarfed it down in seconds, jumped up bold as you please onto the Hound’s lap, and burrowed into the folds of his coat.

  “Warm and vibrating, like a little engine,” Hound said, curling a protective arm around the cat. He felt safe and warm, but something was wrong—Dream Hound hadn’t told the whole story.

  “Won’t get any peace until you tell the whole story,” he told the purring cat. He frowned and closed his eye tight, trying to remember…something else had happened in the mountains, before D.B. Cooper had shown him the lost money, before Arizona. Something in the deep, dark forest that had caused Manlike Woman to go away, too, to disappear like the Hound. Something even more terrible than Ivy…

  But a blinding pain shot through the Hound’s right temple, stopping the memory in its tracks.

  “Be morning soon,” he told Scruff. “And I’ve got something big to do. Something important. Something that can’t wait any more. But you can stay here until I get back. And if I don’t get back, I hereby leave it all to you.”

  A good idea ca
me to the Hound, and he pulled a scrap of menu and a half-smashed ball point pen from the bottom of his favorite plastic bag, the blue one with the smiley face on it. He wrote, “I, Sean Hound Packard, being of more or less sound mind and body, leave all of my things, including my collection of newspaper articles, to Scruff the cat. Please make sure he or she finds a good home. Sincerely, The Hound.”

  He placed his last will and testament at the bottom of the blue plastic bag, tied the handles to a stick, and poked the stick deep into the ground.

  “You make sure someone finds this if I don’t come back,” he told Scruff. “Oh, and I’ll leave the rest of the sandwich meat for you, too.”

  The cat curled tighter into a ball and purred. The Hound hunkered down to wait for dawn.

  3

  The girl was there again. It had been one of Cassie Shirdon’s rare insomnia-free nights, so at least it wasn’t four in the morning this time. But it was still early—just past six a.m.—and it was still way too cold and wet for anyone to be standing on the street in nothing but a sweatshirt and a pair of jeans, just standing there staring down at the sidewalk. It was getting creepy, this complete stranger standing right across from her apartment every morning.

  But was she a complete stranger?

  Cassie stood at the window cradling her steaming cup of coffee, watching the girl. If she would just look up, Cassie might be able to tell if she knew her from somewhere. Maybe Cassie had arrested her once, or she’d been a suspect or witness in a case. There was something familiar in the girl’s body language—the way she stood with a slight forward tilt, hands held loosely at her sides, as if eager to take off running at any moment. In fact, the girl’s build and stance reminded Cassie of a runner…of a long distance runner like one of her best friends in college…

  And then the girl looked up.

  She had a heart-shaped face with a slight cleft chin. A halo of thin, wispy blond hair surrounded her face, and although Cassie was too far away to see it, she knew the girl had a dark round mole near the crease of her nose, on the left side. The girl’s mom had always called the mole her “beauty mark,” and frequently pointed out the many famous pop stars, models, and actors who had similar moles, or even put fake ones in place if nature had failed to provide.

  “Yeah, mom, but they all have them someplace cute like their upper lip, or even someplace sexy like by the side of their eye,” the girl used to say. “Not right near their nose like a brown booger!”

  But the girl always said this with a laugh, free of either bitterness or anxiety. Mostly, the girl didn’t worry much about her mole one way or the other. She was too busy, too active in both sports and her beloved study of chemistry to fuss over her looks. The girl’s name was Julia Kempson, and Shirdon now knew that the girl standing across from her apartment was one of her best friends from college.

  Only that wasn’t quite right.

  Julia Kempson had been one of Cassie’s best friends from college—past tense, because Julia Kempson had been dead for almost two decades.

  The girl standing across from her apartment couldn’t be the same one who had died in a boating accident one otherwise ordinary May afternoon—a boating accident that occurred her and Cassie’s junior year. A boating accident in which Cassie Shirdon had made a decision that had cost Julia Kempson her life.

  The girl who could not be Julia Kempson pulled the hood of her sweatshirt down—the same purple sweatshirt she’d been wearing that May afternoon, Shirdon now realized—and looked up.

  For the first time in over seventeen years, Cassie looked into Julia Kempson’s eyes. The last time, those eyes had been pleading, desperate, and Cassie had been forced—no, had chosen, she had chosen—to look away.

  She didn’t look away this time.

  This time, she stayed locked into those familiar eyes, hazel with a ring of sunlit gold, like a planet ready to supernova. This time, the eyes were neither pleading nor desperate. In her dreams, the eyes always turned angry at the end, even accusing. But this Julia Kempson—the one across from her apartment, the one who could not possibly exist, but did—this Julia’s eyes were empty and silent, like the rest of her.

  Cassie’s hands were shaking so badly that hot sloshes of coffee had spilled over the rim, soaking the sleeve edge of her robe. She closed her eyes and whispered, “What do you want?” at the cold, rain-flecked pane of glass.

  When Cassie opened her eyes, she was half-sure Julia Kempson would be gone. But she wasn’t. She was still standing there, still gazing up at Cassie in a way that was somehow more accusatory than any words could be.

  Cassie wondered how long they would stay like that, one looking down at the other looking up, but a delivery truck emerged from the rain like a steel dragon and belched down the street in a gust of diesel fumes and rumbling engine. When it passed, Julia Kempson was gone.

  Cassie couldn’t remember how she got into the shower and out again, how she worked her way into clothes and down to the car and across the bridge, and somewhere in there even called Martinez to tell him that she’d be in a bit late today. She didn’t know how she ended up driving far out of the city and into the mountains and then back again. She didn’t know where she was going or why, which is also why she had no plan in mind when she found herself circling the neighborhood at the bottom end of Pioneer Park and pulling into the driveway of a yellow house with yellow curtains in the front windows.

  If most of Cassie’s brain had been on auto-pilot, the cop part had been more alert. It was now just past eight in the morning—late enough for the kid to be in school, early enough for Jackie Falten to still be at home.

  Falten opened the front door and then kept it half-closed when she saw who was on the other side.

  “I have to be at work soon.”

  “I know,” Shirdon said, still trying to clear the fog Julia Kempson had left behind. “I just thought of something else I wanted to ask about your husband’s disappearance. Something that could be important.”

  Cassie had no such important new thing to ask. In fact, cop brain aside, she had no clear idea what she was even doing here, or why she’d ended up at Jackie Falten’s house in the first place. But something had brought her here, and she had to see it through.

  Falten hesitated, and for a moment Cassie was sure she’d shake her head and offer a mumbled “I’m sorry” before gently but firmly closing the door. Instead, she opened it and silently beckoned Cassie into the same living room she and Martinez had been on their first visit.

  Neither woman sat down this time. Cassie went and stood in front of the shelf of pictures. Morris Falten grinned out at her from the three top shelves, but the pictures of Jackie were too far down to see.

  Cassie turned to face Morris Falten’s widow. She had to start somewhere. “Ms. Falten—”

  “Jax. My friends call me Jax.”

  “Okay, Jax,” Cassie said, noting the name upgrade. “Jax, I came back this morning to specifically talk to you when your son was gone. I noticed that there’s some…some tension there about the subject of your husband’s disappearance.”

  Jax went and stood in front of the row of blue and gray paintings.

  “You asked me about my family’s Native American heritage,” she said, turning to look at Cassie as if expecting an answer. Shirdon didn’t see how that related to the subject at hand, but she nodded anyway, and Jax continued. “I found out from my grandmother that her grandmother’s family goes back to the Wiyot tribe, from northern California. In eighteen-sixty, a group of white men slaughtered the tribe while they were hosting a world renewal ceremony on what was then called Indian Island. There were only a few survivors. One woman survived by hiding in a trash pile. Two others hid with their children and later searched for other children on the island who were still alive. They found one young boy huddled in his dead mother’s arms. Afterward, the surviving members of the tribe weren’t allowed to return to the island or any of the rest of their land, which was eventually taken from them. Soldi
ers from Fort Humboldt took many of the surviving Wiyot into protective custody at the fort and later transported them to a reservation.”

  Cassie stayed silent, silent as the mist covering the crimes of a blood-soaked island.

  “Before my grandmother died, we took a trip to the island. My grandmother told me, ‘All this land belongs to you, to our people.’ But it didn’t belong to us, not anymore. Still though, members of the Wiyot tribe have been buying back their own land for decades now. A few years ago, the world renewal ceremony was held on the island for the first time in more than a century and a half.”

  Jax pulled a phone out of her pocket. She punched in a number and waited for someone on the other end. “Hi, Fred? It’s Jax. I’m going to be late today. No, no problems. Yeah, no later than ten.”

  She hung up and sank into one of the room’s pillow-strewn couches. Then she picked up where she’d left off as if there hadn’t been any interruption. “If you go to the island today, there are still human bones lying around on the ground. They’ve tried to clean the area up, but you can still find them here and there. Bones stick around to tell their stories long after the people they belonged to are gone.”

  A voice whispered through Cassie’s head—the Hound’s voice:

  You’ve seen them, too, haven’t you?

  The ones that get killed, they’re the most insistent about finishing their stories.

  You’ve killed someone, haven’t you?

  She drove the voice away and sat down on a couch opposite Jax Falten.

  “You’re probably wondering what all this has to do with my husband,” Jax said. “And I’m not sure I know. I’m not even sure why I’m telling you this. I guess when you asked about my family heritage, I started thinking about those bones on the island. About how they stay buried or forgotten for only so long, but then eventually they come back one way or the other. Like it’s inevitable.”

  “Who’s bones are we talking about here, Jax?”